Winston Churchill’s lost card game now on iOS thanks to Donald Rumsfeld

Aspiring video game designers are often pointed to a simple exercise: take a deck of cards and invent a new game. Apparently, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did just that (albeit with two decks) in inventing his own twist on solitaire during the 20th century.

That game could have easily been lost to the sands of time. Instead, it now exists as a free-to-try app on the iOS App Store all thanks to... Donald Rumsfeld?

As the Wall Street Journal reported, the former US Secretary of Defense teamed up with a game developer to develop and launch Churchill Solitaire for iOS devices. Rumsfeld told the paper he learned to play the game during an ambassadorship in the 1970s. Churchill's invention was shared with Rumsfeld by a Belgian ambassador who had been friends with Churchill, and while the Churchill family never found a reference to the game in his collection of letters, a family representative told the WSJ that Rumsfeld's story "is entirely credible."

The game offers a wickedly tough twist on solitaire. The two-deck version deals 10 columns of cards, upon which players can place cards in typical descending-number, alternating-suit fashion, along with a "devil's six" section of cards that can never be placed anywhere but the final ace-first portion of the board. Whenever players want to deal new cards onto the table, they must do so on any rows that haven't been arranged King-first on an empty column—and as cards run low, these deals can create frustrating clusters.

In addition to offering insight on the game's rules, the WSJ report says that Rumsfeld contributed a lot of aesthetic requests—even urging the developers to add more Churchill-related content whenever possible. Rumsfeld also recorded voice memos that he forwarded to the dev team (which he calls "snowflakes"). The game can be fully unlocked for £4, while "hint" and "undo" bonuses can be purchased in micro-transaction packs. An Android version is "coming soon." Rumsfeld has announced that any profits he would have made from game sales will instead be donated to unnamed charities.